THE TEMPLE 
OF HIS BODY 





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LARRABEE 


DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
DURHAM, N. C. 








THE TEMPLE OF 
HIS BODY 


BEING GOOD FRIDAY ADDRESSES ON THE SEVEN 
WORDS FROM THE CROSS 


BY 
EDWARD ALLAN LARRABEE, S.T.B. 


MILWAUKEE 
THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO, 
MCMV 


INTRODUCTION - 


CONTENTS. 


THE SacRED Hanps - 
Tue Lirs oF TRUTH - 
THE ALL-SEEING EYES 
Tue SINLEss SouL - 
THE SUFFERING Bopy 
THE Bopy MysticaL - 


THE SANCTUARY OF THE SPIRIT 





PREFACE. 


Turse Addresses embody the substance of 
the Good Friday Meditations given in the Church 
of the Ascension, Chicago, in 1904. They repre- 
sent an attempt to draw somewhat away from 
the more subjective line of thought usual in Good 
Friday Addresses. 

There is perhaps some ground for the question 
that is beginning to be asked, whether the grow- 
ing popularity of the Three Hours’ Service may 
not contain in itself the danger of substituting de- 
votions mainly subjective in their character for the 
Liturgical Offices of the day? One may recognize 
this danger, and yet feel reluctant to discourage 
the use of a service which has done so much to 
impress the lessons of the Passion upon our people. 


213882 


6 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


The Three Hours give to the pastor an oppor- 
tunity which he must feel unwilling indeed to 
surrender. Not only is it an opportunity of bring- 
ing home to his own people the teaching of the 
Cross, on the day when all must be most disposed 
to listen to this teaching and to be moved by it; 
but of reaching many others less at home in the 
stated services of the Church who are drawn to 
these devotions and gladly take part in them. It 
may even be that a deference to this latter class is 
responsible for the subjective tone and somewhat 
indefinite character of addresses given in the 
Three Hours. Yet it would seem that the pres- 
ence of so many who are unfamiliar with the dis- 
tinctive teachings of the Church, ought rather to 
incite one so to preach Christ Crucified as, if pos- 
sible, to win souls to the love of the Chureh which 
He purchased with His Blood. 

The line of thought taken in these Addresses, 
The Temple of Our Lord’s Body, seemed to lend 
itself to the twofold purpose of turning the mind, 
in the first place, away from self to the Person of 
our Lord; and secondly, while doing this, of keep- 
ing prominent the truth that He is now repre- 


PREFACE. 7 


sented in the world by the Church which is His 
Mystical Body. 

The Addresses are printed as a humble effort 
to do, what, when it shall be done successfully, will 
perhaps turn a threatened danger into a positive 
help. So far from detracting from the prescibed 
Offices of the Church, the Three Hours’ devotion 
ought in the end to minister to them. The love 
and gratitude to the world’s Redeemer which such 
a service fosters should lead to a deeper apprecia- 
tion of the Church’s Liturgical system, as well as 
to a worthier estimation of her Sacraments which 
were purchased at so great a Price. 


INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 


“He spake of the Temple of His Body” (St. John ii. 21). 


As on this Good Friday we gather again, in 
the mercy of God, for our watch beneath the 
Cross, it will perhaps be helpful to follow in 
our meditations a line of thought suggested by 
words of our Lord, spoken at the very beginning 
of His public ministry, and never forgotten by 
the Jews: “Destroy this Temple, and in three 
days I will raise it up.” 

It was on the occasion of the first cleansing 
of the Temple, recorded by St. John immediately 
after the narrative of the Marriage Feast in 
Cana, and following this “beginning of miracles” 
by the interval of only a few days. 

“The Jews’ Passover was at hand, and Jesus 


INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 9 


went up to Jerusalem, and found in the Temple 
those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the 
changers of money sitting: And when He had 
made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all 
out of the Temple, and the sheep and the oxen; 
and poured out the changers’ money, and over- 
threw the tables; and said unto them that sold 
doves, Take these things hence; make not My 
Father’s house an house of merchandise. And 
His disciples remembered that it was written, The 
zeal of Thine house hath eaten Me up. Then an- 
swered the Jews, and said unto Him, What sign 
showest Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest 
these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, 
Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will 
raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six 
years was this Temple in building, and wilt Thou 
rear it up in three days? But He spake of the 
Temple of His Body. When therefore He was 
risen from the dead, His disciples remembered 
that He had said this unto them; and they be- 
lieved in the Scripture, and the word which Jesus 
had said” (St. John ii. 13-23). 

The accusation made against our Lord in the 


10 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


judgment hall of Pilate by false witnesses, who 
remembered, but perverted, His saying, “Destroy 
this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” 
connects these words significantly with His Pas- 
sion. But besides this, we recall the earlier events 
of this great week; the solemn entry of our Lord 
into the Temple on Palm Sunday, His revisiting 
it, and a second time cleansing it on Monday, His 
spending the whole of Tuesday within its pre- 
cincts in teaching and in answering questions. 
Late in the afternoon of that day He left the 
Temple for the last time, and while the disciples 
spoke with admiration of the stones of which it 
was built, foretold its utter ruin. Later still, He 
surveyed it from the opposite slope of the Mount 
of Olives, and spoke of His final judgment and of 
the end of the world. 

All these things connect the Temple, and there- 
fore the analogy which our Lord borrows from it, 
very pointedly with His Cross. 

As we dwell upon this analogy, other sayings 
of our Lord, or words spoken in Scripture con- 
cerning His Passion, recur to us with a new force. 
An example is that saying of the Psalms which 


INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 11 


on this very occasion the disciples called to mind: 
“The zeal of Thine house hath eaten Me up.” 
Like others who did not perceive the hidden 
reference of our Lord, they thought only of His 
zeal for the Temple of Israel, but how the 
prophecy grows in the depth of its significance as 
we apply it to the Temple of His Body: that 
Temple not made with hands, in which, for our 
sakes, He sanctified Himself! 

It is in this Temple of His Humanity, 
“through the veil, that is to say, His Flesh” (Heb. 
x. 20), that our great High Priest by the way of 
His Passion is to enter the Holy of Holies, con- 
summating the typical sacrifices of the ancient 
law, and making full atonement for the sins of 
the whole world. 

We shall therefore try to use these most sol- 
emn hours in which we are gathered about the 
Cross of our Redeemer, in reverent and loving 
contemplation of the Temple of His Humanity. 
The sacred hands, the undefiled lips, the pure 
and holy eyes of Jesus seem in a manner to asso- 
ciate themselves respectively with the first three 
Words uttered on the Cross. Under the Fourth 


12 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Word, our hearts and minds will be directed to the 
contemplation of the sufferings endured by our 
Lord in His sinless soul. These words veil a 
deep mystery, into which we cannot enter, but as 
we stand without at the time of the Sacrifice, we 
may at least learn to sympathize more deeply 
with the unknown and unimagined sufferings of 
the Holy One. The Fifth Word may well be 
taken as putting before us all that the Temple of 
His Body had to bear in physical pain as the sin- 
less Victim was made perfect through suffering. 
The Sixth Word, “It is finished,” has its bearing 
upon the Eucharistic Sacrifice which in the spirit- 
ual Temple of the Catholic Church, the Mystical 
Body of Christ, perpetuates the Sacrifice of Cal- 
vary, and ever prevails through the merits of our 
Lord’s accomplished work. The Seventh and last 
Word carries us into the Holy of Holies of our 
Lord’s Spirit, which as the veil of the temple was 
rent, He commends into His Father’s hands. 
Thus listening to the dying words of our Re- 
deemer, all the faculties ef our soul may be riy- 
eted upon the Person of the Divine Sufferer. 
Surely it is in some such exercise as this that we 


INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 13 


shall best employ these sacred and most precious 
moments. Other opportunities will recur through- 
out the year for merely moral reflections, prac- 
tical and necessary as these are. But now we 
are at the death-bed of the Saviour of mankind, 
and our own best and dearest Friend. As we 
cherish the last precious moments of some earthly 
loved one, and watch the fleeting life before it 
goes forth, our last communings are not in the 
nature of consecutive and coherent words. It is 
through the silent pressure of the hand, the eager 
watching of the lips, the unspoken language of 
the eyes that we convey and receive the last mes- 
sages of love. In like manner, but with in- 
finitely greater tenderness and gratitude and love 
let us now take our place at the Cross of Jesus, 
and draw near to the Temple of His Body. 


FIRST WORD. 


“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 
(St. Luke xxiii. 34.) 


THE SACRED HANDS. 


Ovr Lorp has now traversed the Way of Sor- 
rows. Calvary is reached, and the Cross is lifted 
from His shoulders and laid upon the ground. 
The air is rent with the din of angry shouts. 
The multitude is pressing upon Jesus. It is with 
difficulty that the Roman guard restrains the 
crowd and forces it back, as the soldiers demand 
space in which to execute their work. A clearing 
is made. The implements of crucifixion are col- 
lected and brought nearer. There is perhaps a 
sudden hush, as Jesus deliberately lays Himself 
down upon this hard bed upon which He is to die. 
Without a murmur He surrenders Himself into 


FIRST WORD. 15 


the cruel hands of His executioners. He straight- 
ens His Body, as of His own act, upon the tree of 
shame, He places His Feet together upon the 
wood, and as giving Himself up for the sins of the 
whole world, extends His arms upon the breadth 
of the Cross. 

Upon what now follows, we could not have 
borne to look; nor can we now, even in imagina- 
tion, dwell upon its terrible details. The Roman 
soldiers have carried out their orders. The de 
mand of the Jewish multitude in their cry of 
“Crucify,” has been fulfilled. Jesus is nailed 
to the Cross. 

It was probably during these first moments of 
the agony, and perhaps at the very instant when 
the blows were struck that nailed the sacred Hands 
to the Cross, that our Lord breathed forth the 
prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they know 
not what they do.” 

The prayer and this supreme act of surrender 
go together. 

It is so that the Psalmist associates them: 
“Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as the 
incense, and let the lifting up of my hands be an 


16 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


evening sacrifice.” And truly the word and the 
act are suited to each other. It is as if He said: 
“Behold, O Father, what I am receiving at the 
hands of men, yet look not upon it to take ven- 
geance upon their deed, but to forgive this and 
every sin. They who do this with their cruel 
hands, know not what they do. But I know 
what I do, for I came to do Thy will, and there- 
fore I lay My Hands upon this Cross, I stretch 
them out of My own free will, that receiving in 
them the price of sin, I may pay that price to 
Thee, and by the lifting up of My Hands make 
expiation for the sins of the whole world.” 

We must keep therefore in mind throughout 
all our watch by the Cross, the great truth that 
our Lord is here making expiation for sin. Rey- 
erently we have drawn near, that with hearts full 
of gratitude and love we may look upon Him 
“Who His Own Self bare our sins in His Own 
Body on the Tree” (I. St. Peter ii. 24). And as 
we connect these sayings from the Cross, with that 
other saying of our Lord, in which He likened 
His Body to the Temple, we shall be helped both 
to realize our need of His expiation, and to under- 


FIRST WORD. 17 


stand better how perfectly He has met and satis- 
fied that need. Our hands, our lips, our eyes are, 
as it were, the outer court of the temple of our 
bodies. It is through these principal gates of the 
senses that for good or evil, we have our conver- 
sation in the world, and are brought into con- 
tact with a multitude of human things both good 
and bad that throng about our life, and press 
within the avenues of our senses. It was in like 
manner that a promiscuous crowd habitually 
mingled within the outer court of the temple, and 
streamed back and forth through its gates, so that 
the worship was disturbed by the noise of the 
traffickers. Our Lord whose zeal twice purged 
His Father’s House of this abuse, and which even 
went so far as to forbid that one should carry a 
vessel through the Temple, cannot be indifferent 
to what takes place in the temples of our bodies. 
In the Sermon on the Mount, words are spoken 
by Him which, as we listen to them, make us real- 
ize how strict is the scrutiny of His all-seeing eye. 
It is as if He entered these temples of ours, and, 
as once in the Temple of Jerusalem, paused and 
“looked round about upon all things” (St. Mark 


18 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


xi. 11). As He does so, our eyes, our lips, our 
hands, all come under His scrutiny. He notes 
the words of our lips, and He who elsewhere 
warns us that “every idle word that men speak, 
they shall give account thereof in the day of judg- 
ment” (St. Matt. xii. 36), admonishes us, “Let 
your communication be Yea, yea, Nay, nay; for 
whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (St. 
Matt. v. 37). He looks into our eyes and notes 
whatever defiles them, or turns them away from 
God. ‘The light of the body is the eye: if there- 
fore thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full 
of light. But if thine eye be evil thy whole body 
shall be full of darkness” (St. Matt. vi. 22). “If 
thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it 
from thee” (St. Matt. v. 29). 

And He looks also upon our hands. 

Ah! there is One to whom our hands indeed 
reveal a history. Think of Jesus, as if taking 
your hand within His most pure and holy Hands, 
He said: “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it 
off and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for 
thee that one of thy members should perish, and 


FIRST WORD. 19 


not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” 
(St. Matt. v. 30). 


As He now stretches forth these holy Hands 
of His upon the Cross, we are present to His Mind 
as truly as if for us alone all these sufferings were 
borne. All our misdeeds He foresaw. He be- 
held the long series of sinful acts which we should 
commit against His holy will. Nor was it only 
as far off that He knew them. He felt them as 
in their power to hurt they were made present by 
the hands of the wicked men into which He was 
contented to be betrayed, and whose work it was 
to nail Him to the Cross. Alas! with what awful 
fidelity our guilty hands were there represented. 
An officer of the Chief Priest with his hand struck 
Jesus, and others smote Him with the palms of 
their hands. Hands of men blindfolded Him, 
buffeted Him, entwined the crown of thorns and 
pressed it upon His Head, bound Him, scourged 
Him, led Him forth to Death, and, as we saw just 
now, nailed Him to the Cross. In every such act 
our sins were present. Our lust, our anger, our 
grasping selfishness, were all there, and the malice 


20 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


of our sin was felt in the wounds inflicted in the 
sinless holy Hands of the Son of God. 


And yet it was for this He came. Long be- 
fore this, His Voice had spoken through the 
Prophet Isaiah: “Can a woman forget her suck- 
ing child that she should not have compassion on 
the son of her womb? Yea, she may forget, yet will 
I not forget thee.” And then, as the proof of that 
love which time should reveal, “Behold, I have 
graven thee upon the palms of My Hands” 
(Isaiah xlix. 15, 16). He had looked upon the 
flood of sin increasing upon the earth, and over- 
whelming in its tide such multitudes of men, and 
had foretold the salvation His Cross should bring: 
“He shall spread out His Hands in the midst of 
them as He that spreadeth out His Hands to 
swim” (Isaiah xxv. 11). He had anticipated the 
surprise with which men should behold the strange 
contradiction of the Cross, “One shall say unto 
Him, What are these wounds in Thine Hands? 
Then shall He answer, Those with which I was 
wounded in the House of My friends” (Zech. 
xiii. 6). 

As then we behold Him on the Cross, where 


FIRST WORD. 21 


our sins have nailed Him, let us consider wherein 
lies the efficacy of this perfect Sacrifice, and how 
it is that these Hands have made Atonement for 
the sins of the world. 

First, He who bears this punishment is Him- 
self innocent. The Hands laid upon the Cross 
for us are unstained by any touch of sin. The 
earthly priest before going to the altar has need to 
wash his hands in token of his sense of defilement, 
and of his need of cleansing before he presumes 
to handle holy things. “I will wash my hands in 
innocency and so will I go to Thine Altar” (Psalm 
xxvi. 6). But the great High Priest who here 
goes up to the Altar of the Cross, needs for Him- 
self no cleansing. He who ascends the hill of the 
Lord, who shall afterwards, His Sacrifice com- 
pleted, rise up to intercede for us in the Holy 
Place, has the clean Hands and the pure Heart 
of the God-Man. 

These holy and venerable Hands now made 
fast upon the wood, never offended. Instruments 
of His mercy as He stretched them forth in the 
days of His ministry in healing and blessing 
upon the sick and afflicted, their last work for us 


22 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


is to suffer without resistance during these hours 
of the Passion, that so they may be stretched forth 
for evermore in mercy and forgiveness upon all 
who turn to Him for pardon. 

But what is chiefly to be remembered, since 
everything depends upon this, they are the Hands 
of God. ‘The hand of the Lord.” How often 
is the expression used in Holy Scripture! These 
are the Hands that created the world. And yet 
their work in creation was not so wonderful as 
their work here. It cost these Hands no effort 
to make the world, but what do they not suffer 
in order to redeem it! It was by these Hands 
that the Almighty showed His wonders of old, 
when He redeemed His people Israel leading them 
through the Red Sea and through the wilderness 
and with His mighty Hand and His stretched-out 
Arm brought them into their inheritance. In 
these Hands “He bare them and He carried them 
all the days of old” (Isaiah lxiii. 9). Be it re- 
membered, then, that no mere creature, however 
exalted, or however holy, could have wrought sal- 
vation for us. He who suffered on the Cross, 
though He suffered in man’s nature, was not a 


FIRST WORD. 23 


human person, but the Person of the Son of God 
in human flesh. By sharing man’s nature, He is 
able to suffer for man, and by laying human 
Hands upon the Tree of the Cross to atone for the 
transgression which began when in Eden human 
hands reached forth in disobedience upon the for- 
bidden tree. But while He suffers as Man, it is 
His true Godhead which gives efficacy to His 
Atonement, and obtains the answer to His prayer: 
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do.” 

Our watch by the Cross to-day should tighten 
our grasp upon the blessed truth of our Lord’s 
Atonement for sin. While the world goes on its 
way, boasting its progress, and making light of 
its sin, God forbid that we should glory save in 
the Cross of Christ. We have a double reason 
for spending these hours beneath the Cross. For, 
first, what the Son of God, the Holy, the Innocent, 
the Undefiled here suffers, He suffers at our hands. 
This is the Prince of Glory whom we, by wicked 
hands have crucified and slain. We come to la- 
ment the work of our hands, as with the sons of 
Jacob, we confess, “We are verily guilty concern- 


24 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


ing our Brother” (Gen. xlii. 21). But O, thanks 
be to His infinite mercy and love, there is another 
reason. The injuries He receives from us, conse- 
crated by the touch of His sacred Hands, are 
turned by Him into blessing. The cruel suffer- 
ings our sins have inflicted upon His sacred Hu- 
manity, the Power of His Godhead applies to the 
Salvation of our souls. Truly He could say, 
“They know not what they do.” They know not 
the wrong they inflict upon Me. They know not 
the miracle of My love, the chief manifestation 
of My power in turning even this into their deliv- 
erance from sin. 


SECOND WORD. 


“Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me in 
Paradise” (St. Luke xxiii, 43). 


THE LIPS OF TRUTH. 


Tux Cross, with its precious weight, has been 
raised into its place. Jesus is now lifted up and 
exposed to the gaze of the multitude. It was the 
occasion of a fresh outburst of calumnies. 

“Then were there two thieves crucified with 
Him, the one on the right hand, and the other on 
the left. And they that passed by railed on Him, 
wagging their heads and saying, Thou that de- 
stroyest the temple and buildest it in three days, 
save Thyself. If Thou be the Son of God, come 
down from the Cross; Likewise also the chief 
priests mocking Him with the scribes and elders, 
said, He saved others, Himself He cannot save. 


26 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


If He be the King of Israel, let Him come down 
from the Cross, and we will believe Him: for He 
said I am the Son of God. The thieves also that 
were crucified with Him, cast the same in His 
teeth” (St. Matt. xxvii. 39-45). 


? with which our Lord in- 


The “verily I say,’ 
troduces this second utterance from the Cross, 
calls attention to the Person and to the authority 
of Him who speaks, and thus throws into bolder 
relief the contrast between His most pure and 
holy lips, and those words of blasphemy and false- 
hood which the lips of wicked men were uttering 
against Him. As then we behold Him who en- 
dured such contradiction of sinners against Him- 
self, it is as the Word of God, Truth Incarnate 
that we contemplate Him. We mark the move- 
ment of these dying lips, drawn with pain and 
pallid from loss of blood, as they bestow upon pen- 
itence the gracious promise of this Word, and we 
reflect that they are the lips of Truth, nay of the 
Truth itself and of the eternal Wisdom of God. 
All that was ever spoken of old in the revelation of 
the mind of God, through the Scriptures and the 
Prophets, was the utterance of these lips, the lips 


SECOND WORD. 27 


of Him who is by nature the Word of God. “The 
lip of truth,” says the Proverb, “shall be estab- 
lished forever” (Prov. xii. 19), and these lips 
themselves have said, “Heaven and earth shall 
pass away, but My Word shall not pass away” 
(St. Matt. v. 35). And again, the Proverb says, 
“A divine sentence is in the lips of the king” 
(Prov. xvi. 10). But this is the King of kings 
whose sentence shall be pronounced upon all men 
at the last great day. 

It is in the light of this consideration that we 
must weigh what Jesus suffered and still suffers 
from the lips of men. Our evil words, however 
uttered, and to whomsoever addressed, are in 
reality directed against the Person of Christ. The 
wrong they inflict upon ourselves, and the injury 
they work upon our neighbor, are nothing com- 
pared with this, that they contradict Him who 
is the Eternal Truth. In our falsehoods, our ir- 
reverent speech, our unseemly conversation, we 
take up the calumnies and contradictions of the 
jeering multitude about the Cross, and we, like 
the thieves, “cast the same in His teeth.” 

Yet think of the patience with which the Word 


28 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


of God Himself submits to this outrage: before 
Pilate, silent; before Herod, silent; before false 
accusers, answering never a word. O the mys- 
tery of that condescension, in which Truth Eternal 
submits in silence to be thrice denied by St. Peter, 
to bear with the “Hail, Master,” of Judas, as the 
traitor’s lips are pressed against His cheek, to be 
examined by the High Priest, to be made to listen 
to the mockery of the soldiers as in the early morn- 
ing of this day, to be impudently questioned by 
Herod, to be asked by Pilate, “What is Truth?’ 
to accept without question the sentence of His un- 
just condemnation which the clamor of the angry 
multitude have exacted from a cowardly judge. 

Let us look into that Face, and as we consider 
those lips so accustomed to silence under wrong, 
let us mark how He makes reparation for our sins 
of speech. “Woe is me, for I am undone because 
I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the 
midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah vi. 5). 
O Jesus, patient and silent under wrong, be Thou 
the atonement for my sins of word. 

And now let us consider the legacy which the 
lips of Jesus have left us. The Gospel contains 


SECOND WORD. 29 


the record not only of His works, but of the words 
of Him who spake as never man spake. At the 
viry beginning of His public life, immediately 
after the temptation in the wilderness, He goes 
to His cwn city, Nazareth, and in the synagogue, 
standing up to read, finds that place where it is 
written in the Prophet Isaiah: “The. Spirit of 
the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed 
Me to preach the Gospel to the poor, He hath sent 
Me to heal the broken-heatted, to preach deliver- 
ance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the 
blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to 
preach the acceptable year of the Lord” (St. Luke 
iv. 18). And then, as sitting down, He applied 
this prophecy to Himself; all bare Him witness 
and wondered at the gracious words which pro- 
ceeded out of His mouth. As He began His 
earthly ministry, so now with like gracious words 
He is closing it. Let us then, in this solemn 
hour, call to memory all the holy doctrines which 
He taught; the sublime precepts of the Sermon 
on the Mount, the inexhaustible treasures of the 
Parables, the simplicity of that wisdom in which 
He gave meek answer to His adversaries, and laid 


30 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


bare their hypocrisy, the woes spoken in sternness, 
yet in merciful warning against Scribe and Phar- 
isee, the love in which He shrank not from de- 
claring the eternal punishment which must over- 
take the impenitent, all the high discourse con- 
cerning the Kingdom of God, and the unflinching 
and uncompromising enunciation of the nature 
and the necessity of those Sacraments without 
which we have no union with Him, and through 
which alone we can share in His victory over 
death, and be made partakers of His everlasting 
life. 

Truly was it said, ‘““Never man spake like this 
man” (St. John vii. 46), nor is it wonderful that 
outside the pale of the Church, and even outside 
the number of those who call themselves by the 
Christian name, the world itself recognizes in 
Jesus the greatest and the most sublime of all 
teachers, the supreme Master of the spiritual life, 
who while He could challenge the world to convict 
Him of the slightest moral fault, is still for man- 
kind at large the only perfect model, the only in- 
fallible interpreter of conscience. 

Yet how much more is Christ than this! 


SECOND WORD. 31 


Great as is this Teacher, if He were no more than 
a teacher, the words here spoken to the dying thief 
would have left him uncomforted, unabsolved. 
Let us put ourselves in the place of this penitent 
as St. Luke brings the scene before us. 

“And one of the malefactors railed on Him, 
saying, if Thou be the Christ, save Thyself and 
us, but the other answering, rebuked him, saying, 
dost thou not fear God ; seeing thou art in the same 
condemnation, and we indeed justly for we receive 
the due reward of our deeds, but this man hath 
done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, 
Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy 
Kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I 
say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with Me in 
Paradise” (St. Luke xxiii. 39-44). 

To this man, knowing his death to be so near, 
his conscience now aroused so that he sees his sins 
and the wretchedness of his wasted life, something 
more is needed than moral teaching, even though 
it were the most sublime that lips of man could 
utter. Does he not confess it? ‘Lord, remember 
me,” is his prayer. But what mere man could 
have met this need? Which one of all the world’s 


32 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


teachers could have given the definite assurance 
spoken by Christ: “Verily I say unto thee, to-day 
shalt thou be with Me in Paradise” ? 

Let us note well, for everything turns upon 
this, the difference between Christ and every other 
teacher. Others were at best seekers after Truth. 
Christ 7s the Truth. Others professed themselves 
learners of a truth greater than themselves. 
Christ proclaims Himself the way, the truth, and 
the life. Others proclaimed a message. Christ 
proclaims His own Person. It is because Christ 
is His own message that the dying thief finds in 
Him all that he needs. His prayer is not, “Mas- 
ter, instruct me,” but, “Lord, remember me.” 
What he craves is a relationship to the Person of 
Christ which shall abide to his endless happiness 
in a Kingdom never to be destroyed. 

And how completely this prayer is answered. 
For, first, there is no place left for doubt or mis- 
giving, but the promise is made to rest upon the 
authority of His Godhead: “Verily, I say.” It 
is not general, but definite and particular: “I say 
unto thee.” It is not a remote prospect, a vague 
and distant hope: “To-day’’ it shall be fulfilled. 


SECOND WORD. 33 


It is not, finally, the mere sharing in the good 
things of His Kingdom, but it is a personal union 
with Himself: “thou shalt be with Me.” The 
authority of God, the power of God, the love of 
God, are all declared in this brief Word. 

As we note, then, these words of authority 
which fall from the dying lips of Jesus, let us 
weigh well the difference between merely hearing 
about the Truth, and being brought, as was the 
penitent thief, under its power. ‘The Voice of 
the Lord is mighty in operation” (Psalm xxix. 4). 
That Voice, through which creation itself sprang 
into being, is still active and operative. It lives 
on in the Sacraments which it has created, and 
through which, by the power of the Holy Ghost, 
Jesus works the marvels of His will. It is one 
thing to hear, as the Jews of old heard through 
the lips of their prophets, revelations concerning 
the power of Christ; it is another, and an infinite- 
ly greater to be brought into contact with that 
power as Christ Himself speaks His word of 
authority. Surely there is but one attitude for us 
sinners to-day, and that is the attitude in which we 
place ourselves by the side of the penitent thief, 


34 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


and make his prayer our own. As we take this 
position in lowly penitence, who but must long 
for a word from the Crucified, bringing to the 
soul the like definite and personal assurance to 
that which He granted to this penitent at the 
Cross? O perhaps to someone here there comes 
to-day, for the first time, the knowledge of this 
priceless legacy of our Saviour’s authoritative 
word, still living, still operative through the min- 
istry of His Church. What will be the joy of 
such an one if before the Easter dawn, nay, if 
“to-day” the word of pardon such as that which 
gladdened the penitent thief shall be his. And 
why should not this be? No sins are too great 
for this absolving word. They were His own lips 
which said: ‘Whosesoever sins ye remit they are 
remitted.” O blessed word of reconciliation, 
word of deliverance, word of power! O precious 
word “I absolve thee,” whose efficacy is in the 
Blood of Jesus Christ! ‘“O great and wonderful 
Sacrament of pardon! What marvels hast thou 
wrought, what evils rooted out, what good things 
planted in their place! What wondrous changes 
dost thou work! The lost thou recoverest, the 


SECOND WORD. 35 


diseased thou healest, the dead thou quickenest, 
thou restorest all things! O word of pardon, win- 
ning back the favor of God, wiping out debts, 
adorning the mind, treasuring merit, dispensing 
peace, yielding the increase of glory! Of sinners 
thou makest saints, entwining their crowns, and 
placing palms in their hands! O Jesu, Saviour 
of the perishing, Captain who leadest back the 
erring, how tender and how mighty Thou art while 
working these marvels in the most holy laver of 
Thy Blood!” 


THIRD WORD. 


“Woman, behold thy son! Behold thy Mother!” 
(St. John xix. 26, 27.) 


THE ALL-SEEING EYES. 


Up tro this moment what a succession of sad 
and sorrowful sights had confronted our Lord. 
The senses have been called the gateways of the 
soul, and through this gateway of the eyes there 
had pressed upon His heart every spectacle of sin 
that could afflict and weigh down His pure and 
sinless soul. 

As we meditate upon the sad and patient eyes 
of Jesus, weary with looking upon sin, let us 
remember that though now humbled and made 
ashamed for us, they are in truth the eyes of the 
Lord which are in every place, beholding the evil 
and the good. St. John, who alone records this 


THIRD WORD. 37 


Word from the Cross, was afterwards to behold 
these eyes as flames of fire; and as he tells us in 
the Revelation, to fall at His feet as dead. 

-Yet now they have their sad share in the hu- 
miliation and suffering of His Passion. LEarlier 
this morning these eyes which search every heart, 
and are to try all men at the last, were made to 
look for the first time upon the actual implements 
of the Passion. They rested upon the scourge 
as it hung idle in the hands of a soldier, and 
studied the cruel ingenuity of which He knew He 
~ was to make trial in streams of His Blood. They 
looked steadily at the Cross, as the actual instru- 
ment of the Passion was first brought to His view, 
all unstained as yet with His Blood, and He 
weighed in His perfect foreknowledge the suffer- 
ing it should exact from His sinless Flesh. “In- 
struments of cruelty are in their hands,” and as 
these tender and loving eyes make acquaintance 
with them, one by one, He reads in each the in- 
gratitude of His chosen people, and of us who 
have joined with them in preparing a Cross for 
our Saviour. 

Through the constantly changing scenes of last 


38 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


night and this morning He has been led from place 
to place, and as one, and then another of the prin- 
cipal figures in the Passion has passed before Him, 
His eyes have looked into each face, and have 
pierced down through every deceit to read the very 
secrets of the heart. Everywhere He has encoun- 
tered the enmity and the malice of sin. Before 
these meek and patient eyes pass in turn the pride 
and arrogancy of the Chief Priests, the envy and 
craftiness of the Scribes and Pharisees, the moral 
cowardice of Pilate, the sensuality of Herod. 

And now, as He hangs uplifted what does He 
behold in that sea of upturned faces? Men are 
critically reading the title on the Cross, or noting 
with heartless unconcern the lingering torture of 
Crucifixion. The words of the Psalm are the 
voicing of His complaint: “They stand staring 
and looking upon Me” (Psalm xxii. 17). Pride 
and hatred, envy and malice, lustful greed, and 
cruel sensuality are all gathered here. “Many 
oxen are come about Me, fat bulls of Basan close 
Me in on every side” (Psalm xxii. 12). 

As Noah looked forth from the Ark upon the 
flood, and gazed afar upon the waste of waters 


THIRD WORD. 39 


that had overwhelmed the world in its sin, so our 
Lord looks down from the Cross upon the angry 
multitude which gathers up and exhibits before 
Him every type of wickedness and makes man- 
ifest the malice of that world-wide, age-long tor- 
rent of sin which He had come to atone. But yet 
again, as from the waters of the Flood, the dove 
afterwards brought back to Noah the olive leaf 
plucked off, the pledge of safety, the promise of 
peace, so with this third Word, there emerges as 
it were from the deluge of sin which surges around 
the Cross, the form of our Lord’s Blessed Mother, 
the promise of a restored world, the earnest of a 
new heaven and a new earth. 

“Now there stood by the Cross of Jesus His 
Mother, and His Mother’s sister, Mary the wife 
of Cleophas and Mary Magdalene; when Jesus 
therefore saw His Mother, and the disciple stand- 
ing by whom He loved, He saith unto His Mother, 
Woman, behold thy son! Then saith He to the 
disciple, Behold thy Mother! And from that 
hour that disciple took her unto his own home” 
(St. John xix. 25-28). 

“When Jesus therefore saw His Mother.” O 


40 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


how gladly we turn from the thought of the sin 
which the eyes of Jesus here encountered, to their 
resting for a time in the contemplation of His 
Blessed Mother! True, there is a sense in which 
the meeting of the eyes of Jesus and those of Mary 
meant for them both a keener and deeper pang 
of suffering, as in that bond of love which bound 
together the immaculate Mother and her Divine 
Son, He suffered in her, and she in Him. Yet 
we listen to the brief narrative which accom- 
panies this Word with a sense of relief and of 
holy comfort. For here, the suffering however 
great, is a suffering born of sympathy and love, 
and the love which begets the suffering remains 
as its consolation. And how patient have been 
these eyes which now turn toward her whom He 
loves as son never before loved mother! He has 
prayed first for His murderers, then He has par- 
doned and consoled the penitent, and last of all He 
searches out His nearest and dearest. And in all 
it is as ever looking unto His Father, and as ful- 
filling His will. “I have been left unto Thee 
ever since I was born: Thou art He that took Me 
from My mother’s womb” (Psalm xxii. 10). 


THIRD WORD. 41 


And on Mary’s part, how had she waited for 
this moment, and for the word addressed to her! 
Is there not a lesson here for those called into spe- 
cial nearness to God, that like the Blessed Virgin 
and St. John they may value above their own spir- 
itual consolation the work that Jesus does for 
those in special and urgent need of mercy and for- 
giveness? How in St. John’s simple narrative 
is it assumed, as a matter of course, that Jesus 
must first minister to the needs of men, who, as 
the world would say, had no claim upon Him, be- 
fore He turns with this assurance of love and His 
word of consolation to those nearest to Him. “I 
came not to call the righteous, but sinners to re- 
pentance.” 

We may not fathom the mystery of that com- 
munion in which the eyes of Jesus and of His 
Mother meet, a communion too deep for words. 
From those earliest years in Nazareth it must 
have been thus that Mother and Son held com- 
munion together, as heart spoke to heart in a depth 
of spiritual understanding for the utterance of 
which words would be at once unnecessary and in- 
adequate. How few are the recorded words of 


42 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Jesus to His Mother; while of Mary’s words after 
her Magnificat, we have almost none. But from 
the time that as a little Babe He lay in her arms, 
and His eyes looked up into hers, what commun- 
ings were theirs, and what depths of understand- 
ing. 

It is nothing strange, then, that here also it 
should be less by spoken words than by His look 
that our Lord addresses His mother. As inter- 
preted in that look there is no lack of endearment 
in the term “Woman.” It may be that He would 
spare her the suffering which the use of the more 
tender word Mother would have involved at such a 
time, and there seems to be a purpose in our Lord’s 
reserving this term to express her new relation to 
St. John and through him to His whole Church. 
Certain it is that the title “Woman” recalls to her 
mind, as no other word could have done, the glory 
and dignity of her vocation. At least once before, 
at the marriage feast in Cana, He had used this 
term in addressing her, and by using it had 
pointed forward to this hour when He should no 
longer say, “Woman, what have I to do with 
thee?” (St. John ii. 4) ; but, His hour having now 


THIRD WORD. 43 


come for the making perfect His Sacrifice, should 
call upon her to take her part with Him, and to 
unite her will to His in the oblation He would 
make. How in this word must she have recalled 
Cana, and how must the title ““‘Woman” have sum- 
moned her to that supreme surrender in which 
even this holiest and dearest of all earthly ties 
should be swallowed up in that holier relation 
still, as she unites her will to His in the Sacrifice 
He offers for the sins of the world. 

And further back still her memory must have 
gone to that moment when, after losing the joy of 
her eyes, she had found Him after three days in 
the Temple. O the gladness of beholding Him, 
and the love with which His eyes had then met 
hers after this first separation between them! 
But now as these same eyes look upon her from the 
Cross, with what new depth of meaning is borne 
upon her memory the saying of Jesus when but 
twelve years old, “Wist ye not that I must be 
about My Father’s business?’ Yes, this is that 
business, for which even then He was preparing 
both Himself and her. How mercifully had His 
loving Providence led her on, that parting with 


d4 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Him willingly at the Cross she may find Him on 
the third day in the Temple of His Risen Body. 

And then her memory goes back to the sacred 
Infancy of her Son and Lord. She remembers 
how she had had her part to fulfil as in her arms 
He was carried to the Temple, there to be offered 
in His Father’s House. The suffering of this pres- 
ent hour is only in fulfilment of what she then 
undertook when so long ago she had given Him 
back to God. How had this lesson, that what 
God gives is in order to sacrifice, been impressed 
upon her from the beginning! When He was 
but eight days old she had learned it in the shed- 
ding of the first drops of His precious Blood. 
And now, as in the completion of His Sacrifice, 
He is shedding the last drops of that Blood, she 
learns at once the unity of His work, and the con- 
sistency of that vocation which has bound up her 
life with His. Simeon’s prophecy of the sword 
that should pierce her own heart also, is remem- 
bered with deep inward exultation, as she realizes 
now its fulfilment in a suffering which binds her 
indissolubly to her Divine Son. 

It is with His eyes, even more than with His 


THIRD WORD. 45 


lips that our Lord addresses His beloved Disciple. 
He does not here call that disciple by name. St. 
John marks the movement by which the eyes of 
Jesus turn from His Mother to rest upon him. 
“Woman, behold thy son,” He had said; and 
then looking into the eyes of His disciple, but 
without addressing him by name, “Behold thy 
mother.” “I will guide thee with Mine eye.” 
Those who live close to God are directed and ruled 
wonderfully and secretly by His Holy Spirit. Our 
Lord has purposes for us which it is His will we 

should learn without their distinct enunciation 
; by a word of command; but as we grow more and 
more into the knowledge of His will through the 
sacramental life. “If it were not so I would not 
have told you” (St. John xiv. 2). It is St. John 
himself who tells us, “Ye have an unction from 
the Holy One, and ye know all things.” “The 
anointing which ye have received of Him abideth 
in you, and ye need not that any man teach you, 
but as that same anointing teacheth you all things, 
and is truth and is no lie, and even as it hath 
taught you ye shall abide in Him” (I. St. John ii. 
20, 27). 


46 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


And now let us consider what it is that Jesus 
here accomplishes. He draws the eyes of His 
Mother and of this disciple to Himself to meet 
His gaze, and then He bids them turn their eyes 
upon each other. “Behold thy son: Behold thy 
mother.” He is teaching us that in every tie of 
kindred, and in every bond of holy friendship we 
are to see Him. Our loved ones are His gift to 
us. The loved ones who received and sheltered 
us when we came helpless into the world, and every 
pure friendship which has come into our lives 
since, are alike from Him. And as they came 
from Him so are they meant to lead back to Him. 
O how blessed and happy may such ties become if 
this is remembered, and if we let Him hallow them 
and consecrate them to Himself as He offers to 
do. As at Cana He changed the water into wine, 
so will He, as we ask His blessing on those ties of 
kindred or friendship which we cherish in His 
fear and love, change what is weak and unstable 
into the wine of His grace, purifying, strengthen- 
ing, and consecrating forever the ties which bind 
us to each other in Him. 


To-day, then, as we behold Him, Mary’s Son, 


THIRD WORD. 47 


and the Son of God, in the midst of mortal agony, 
consoling His Blessed Mother and His beloved 
disciple, let us commend to Him our loved ones. 
Let our gratitude ascend to Him for every gift of 
love with which He has enriched our lives. May 
His Presenee and His grace guard us from all 
selfishness, teach us the beauty of self-sacrifice, 
and enable us to fulfil every responsibility to 
which He has annexed the consolations of earthly 
friendship. And so as we have received these 
dear ones from Him, may we love them in Him 
and for Him, and may we with perfect resigna- 
tion, whenever He may require it, surrender them 
back to Him. 

And then shall we not see in this bond created 
at the Cross between the Blessed Mother and St. 
John the beginning and the ideal of the Com- 
munion of Saints? In that wider fellowship 
which binds together in one all the people of God, 
here is the pattern from which we are to learn. 
He who looks from the Cross upon His loved ones 
and bids them look upon each other, is the Center 
and the Source of the Communion of Saints. Let 
us not fear to enjoy what He has blessed. Death 


48 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


does not interrupt this communion, for He who 
established it has Himself triumphed over death. 
He would have us remember our blessed departed. 
He loves to hear the prayers which witness to the 
enduring after death of the ties which He created, 
and has promised to bless. And in regard to those 
holy ones, His blessed saints now glorified and in 
His Presence, His will is that we should turn our 
eyes often upon them. Since communion with 
them honors His victory over death, and since we 
cannot speak to them without speaking of Him, 
He would leave us free in this blessed intercourse. 
As bound to Him, we are bound to each other in 
the fellowship of Saints. In giving His Blessed 
Mother to St. John, He gave her to us all, and 
has charged her to remember us with more than 
mother’s love. For each of us He said, “Woman, 
behold thy son,” and to each of us His eye is 
turned as He adds, “Behold thy mother.” 


FOURTH WORD. 


“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” 
(St. Matt. xxvii. 46.) 


THE SINLESS SOUL. 


Tue three sayings of our Lord that have now 
been considered were spoken at intervals in the 
earlier moments of the Saviour’s Agony. Those 
which follow must have been uttered almost 
consecutively at its very close. There would thus 
be a long period of silence, as far as any recorded 
word of our Lord is concerned, between these 
earlier and later utterances, and as we compare 
these sayings themselves we notice a marked dif- 
ference in the character and purpose of the two 
groups into which they fall. 

In the earlier words we see our Lord actively 
ministering to others. His own sufferings are 


50 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


kept in the background while He intercedes for 
His murderers, pardons the penitent thief, con- 
soles His Blessed Mother and St. John. These 
sayings show us the Tree of Life in the fruitage 
of its actual graces, the medicine of those leaves 
which are “for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 
xxli. 2). But in the later words, beginning with 
this upon which we are now to meditate, our Lord 
speaks of Himself. His last special offices for 
others are over. His Blessed Mother, it has been 
thought, had now been taken by St. John away 
from the scene of the Passion. Our Lord, as far 
as we are told, gives no further word of recognition 
to those about the Cross, but as He retires into 
the depths of His Passion He invites the world to 
the contemplation of His suffering. In His re- 
maining words He speaks of the sorrow of His 
Soul, the suffering of His Body, the consumma- 
tion of His work, the surrender of His Spirit. 
Here we are viewing the Cross on its passive side 
while its Divine Victim appeals to us in words 
like to those in which the prophet Jeremiah fore- 
told the Passion. “Is it nothing to you, all ye that 
pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow 


FOURTH WORD. 51 


like unto My sorrow which is done unto Me, 
wherewith the Lord hath afflicted Me in His fierce 
anger” (Lam. i. 12). 

And so, if we keep to the analogy which we 
have chosen as a guide to our thoughts to-day, we 
have in our considerations thus far been lingering 
in the outer courts of the Temple of our Lord’s 
sacred Humanity. 

But, as in the temple of the Jews, a veil sep- 
arated the outer court from the Holy Place into 
which the Priest alone could enter, so here our 
Lord retires within the secret solitude of His Soul, 
and as He passes within the veil of His unknown 
sufferings leaves us as it were standing without, 
and unable to follow Him. So Zacharias the 
Priest went within the veil at the time of the 
offering of the incense, and the people stood with- 
out, waiting for his return. Or as when one we 
love is borne away from us in the vessel that is 
to carry him across the seas: the last handelasp is 
over, the last words are exchanged as the vessel 
slowly moves from its dock, our eyes are strained 
to catch one more sight of the loved face as the 
ship now glides into the stream, and then it passes 


52 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


on its way, and leaves us with only the treasures of 
our memory. 

Here, then, in this strange cry, “My God, My 
God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ our Lord 
is shrouded as it were from our sight, by a dark- 
ness like that which ere this Word was spoken, 
had come up over all the land, as if nature her- 
self would remind us of the veil of mystery beyond 
which we may not venture to pass. 

It is enough for us to know that our Lord goes 
behind this veil for us, as our great High Priest 
to carry to completion the work of His Atonement. 
He is the great Minister of the Sanctuary who at 
the beginning of His Office has been looking to- 
ward the people, but now turns His Face toward 
the Altar of His Sacrifice, and lifts up His Hands 
in silence to God. Thus it is in the Celebration 
of those Holy Mysteries which perpetuate the me- 
morial of this Sacrifice. We listen first to those 
portions of the Liturgy which are addressed to the 
people for their instruction and preparation, and 
then the Priest begins the solemn Action itself 
in which is mystically shown forth the Lord’s 
Death, for the pleading of His Sacrifice, and 


FOURTH WORD. 53 


which accomplished, He again lifts up His voice 
in an ascription of praise to God. So, in the 
midst of the supernatural darkness enveloping the 
Cross, our Lord has long been suffering in silence, 
accomplishing in the agony of His Soul His all- 
atoning Sacrifice. Then, as the Sacrifice is fin- 
ished, He utters this ery to God, and of what has 
taken place we learn what little we can under- 
stand only when all is over. 

What then may we, without presumption, seek 
to gather from this word ? 

First, let it be said, that these words are not to 
be taken in a strictly literal sense. In the truest 
sense it was impossible for God to forsake Him 
who is ever the Son of God, as the Father is ever 
the Father. In that perfect union whereby in 
the mystery of the Holy Trinity the Father and 
the Son are, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, One 
Essence, there could not, of course, be a moment’s 
breach. Nor could our Lord’s Manhood be sep- 
arated from His Godhead for the twinkling of an 
eye. Men in their false systems of religious 
thought have imported into the doctrine of the 
Atonement a sort of antagonism between the Di- 


54 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


vine Persons of the Holy Trinity, as if on one 
hand our Lord did not share the Father’s right- 
eous indignation against sin, and would be less 
strict than the Father to exact the full penalty due 
to man’s transgression; and as if, on the other 
hand the Eternal Father who in His infinite love 
for mankind freely gave His only Begotten Son, 
could not share that tenderness for man which 
made it the joy of the Son to seek and to save that 
which is lost. It were a strange way to approach 
the doctrine of the Atonement, the At-one-ment, 
to begin by imagining discord in the councils of 
the Godhead Itself, as if there were disagreement 
between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity on 
the subject of man’s fall. 

Certainly these words do not mean that our 
Lord was deprived of that which belongs to Him 
by Nature as the Son of God. They do not mean 
that either as God or as man He forfeited for an 
instant His Father’s love. When men have gone 
so far as to say not only that our Lord was liter- 
ally God-forsaken, but that He was the only hu- 
man being who ever was God-forsaken, we see the 
need of holding fast the well-known definitions 


FOURTH WORD. 55 


of Faith which protect the Catholic Doctrine of 
God. 

As to the meaning, then, of these words, it will 
help us if we remember that our Lord is quoting 
them exactly as they stand at the beginning of the 
Twenty-second Psalm. Not only are the Psalms 
like the rest of the Holy Scriptures, His own 
Word, but by His use of them both in the regular 
course of the Jewish Services, and in His own sol- 
itary communings with God, they are interwoven 
into every scene of His earthly life. While un- 
doubtedly the whole Psalter was thus constantly 
on His lips, it is evident that there are many ex- 
pressions in the Psalms which would be inappro- 
priate in the mouth of our Lord, if He spoke of 
Himself apart from His relation to us. In what 
sense, for example, could He use the Penitential 
Psalms? How could He say, “Behold I was 
shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother 
conceived me” ? (Psalm li. 5). 

The answer is, that our Lord made Himself 
one with us, in order to do penance for our sins; 
and moreover He was by a Sacramental union so 
to incorporate us into Himself, that we should be 


56 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


made one with Him. Thus, taking upon Him the 
burden of our sin, He speaks as our Mouthpiece. 
In the words just quoted, He who is Himself 
sinless, takes upon Him the confession of our de- 
filement from our very birth. So it is in all the 
expressions of deep penitence of which the Psalms 
are full, and which are of course inapplicable to 
our Lord’s sinless Humanity. And it is the same 
here. In this ery, “My God, My God, why hast 
Thou forsaken Me?” our Lord is precenting, as 
it were, for His whole Church this Twenty-second 
Psalm. He, the sinless, has identified Himself 
with the sinful. ‘He hath made Him to be sin 
for us who knew no sin” (II. Cor. v. 21). He 
whose Humanity was bathed constantly in the 
radiance of the Godhead from which it could not 
be separated, speaks in behalf of us whom He has 
made His brethren, and to whom the words of 
Isaiah apply, “Your iniquities have separated be- 
tween you and your God, and your sins have hid 
His face from you that He will not hear” 
(Isaiah lix. 2). 

Ah, no! It is precisely because He is ever 
One with God, because He never could, in a lit- 


FOURTH WORD. 57 


eral sense, be forsaken of God,that He was able 
to make perfect this Atonement for us. While, 
then, we may not penetrate the mystery of this 
Word, or fathom the suffering which lies beneath 
it, we know that one chief part of our Lord’s work 
was to do penance for our sin. Now the first part 
of penance is to take the measure of sin, to see it in 
its true light, to lay it bare in all its shameful out- 
rage upon the Father’s love. No one of us, no 
mere man could possibly make this estimate of 
sin; partly because one effect of our being con- 
ceived in sin and shapen in iniquity is to render 
us blind to the very nature of the malady, and 
further, because we do not know, and never can 
fully know, what that love is against which we 
have sinned. There has been but one Human 
Heart that could feel the full enormity of man’s 
sin, and adequately suffer for it, and that is the 
Heart which, while it bore upon the Cross the 
conscious weight of the sins of the whole world, 
was not forsaken by the Father, but was pressed 
close to His Bosom that as it was enfolded in the 
Father’s love, it might measure the ingratitude 
of the sin by which that love is rejected. 


58 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Yes, we must indeed stand without the veil. 
For who of all flesh may accompany Him as He 
enters into His own Heart, as He fathoms the 
depths of His own Soul, and with full knowledge 
of all the sins which needed, or should need, His 
Atonement, bears their weight in a Soul which 
from the moment of its creation was united to the 
Godhead. “I have trodden the wine-press Alone, 
and of the people there was none with Me” (Isaiah 
lxiii. 3). 

And yet our sins were there, yours and mine; 
the sins which eyes have seen, the sins which no 
eye but God’s has witnessed; the sins of thought, 
the sins of word, the sins of deed, the sins of 
omission, the sins for which we make such poor 
and inadequate repentance, all were there. And 
while He made for them such full and perfect sat- 
isfaction, He felt the shame, and the humiliation, 
and the sorrow which is their due, and which, 
alas! in our blindness and insensibility we cannot 
feel. 

One part of Repentance is Confession. But 
Confession implies more than the bare enumera- 
tion of our sins, however truthful and exact this 


FOURTH WORD. 59 


may be. It should be accompanied by a keen 
sense of shame for the guilt incurred, and by a 
loving sorrow for having offended God. As a 
matter of fact, a good Confession usually both 
quickens our perception of the evil of sin, and in- 
creases that genuine sorrow which flows from the 
love of God. Yet confessions may. be made 
formally and mechanically, with little either of 
love or of sorrow. There is an anxiety sometimes 
to spare one’s self that sense of shame and that 
confusion of face which sin has so justly deserved, 
and which it is the very purpose of Confession to 
intensify, and there may be the temptation to 
glide rapidly over matters that call for the deepest 
penitence, perhaps even putting a better face on 
their statement than is quite consistent with truth. 
But even when there is no intentional fault or 
omission, how poor at best must be our confessions 
of sin! How little we realize the love that has been 
outraged, or the cost at which our pardon was 
bought with the precious Blood of the Son of God! 
Now it is to supply this lack on our part, that our 
Lord suffers here an intolerable sense of shame, as 
He feels the weight of our sins as if they were 


60 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


His own. He is making our general Confession 
for us, forgetting nothing, leaving out nothing, 
slurring over nothing; but fully, and with all the 
circumstances that aggravated the sin, taking the 
shame upon Himself. 

As we listen then to that heart-breaking ery, 
“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ?” 
let us think of Him as having made with broken 
and penitent heart for each one of us the full con- 
fession of our sins, so many of which we have for- 
gotten or never knew; and since we who were once 
afar, off are now, by the Blood of His Covenant, 
made nigh to God, pray we that He will never for- 
sake us, or suffer us to be separated from Him. 


FIFTH WORD. 
“IT thirst” (St. John xix. 28). 


THE SUFFERING BODY. 


In tue Word last considered we were left, as 
we saw, standing without the Holy Place, within 
which our Lord had passed to endure in solitude 
the unimagined suffering of His sinless Soul. 
But while we have stood in reverent wonder be- 
fore that mystery in which His Soul was made 
an offering for sin, the sacred Body has still 
hung in silent agony upon the Cross. Unable 
to penetrate the mystery of the great interior sor- 
row of the Passion, our eyes rest again upon the 
sacred Form which, pallid and white, stands out 
against the clouds of the now retreating darkness. 
In all that has taken place within the hidden cham- 
bers of the Soul, the physical sufferings of the 


62 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Passion have not abated. Their very climax is 
reached in the agony of thirst to which the fever 
of His Wounds, and the awful weariness of the 
Cross have reduced Him. The thirst of the Pas- 
sion follows as of necessity upon the Passion’s 
immeasurable expenditure. Our Lord had spent 
all that He had. He is shedding now the last 
drops of His Blood. In the pouring out of His 
love for us, He thirsts for the requital of that love. 
“T am poured out like water, all my bones are out 
of joint. My heart also in the midst of My Body 
is even like melting wax. My strength is dried 
up like a potsherd, and Thou shalt bring Me into 
the dust of death” (Psalm xxii. 14, 15). 

A prophecy in the Sixty-ninth Psalm had 
spoken of vinegar being given Him to drink in this 
hour of His humiliation. As if to invite its ful- 
filment, Jesus utters these words, “I thirst”; and 
one of the soldiers made haste, and dipping a 
sponge in a vessel of sour wine, he raises it upon 
the stem of hyssop to our Saviour’s lips. It is 
suggestive that this saying of our Lord, like the 
preceding one which it has quickly followed, is 
connected with a prophecy of the Psalms. Spoken 


FIFTH WORD. 63 


thus together after a long period of silent suffer- 
ing, these two sayings sum up better than 
other words could, the double agony of Mind and 
Body which our Lord had to feel. And in both 
sayings He is applying the measuring rod of the 
Cross. We have seen Him applying it to the di- 
mensions of man’s sin in its outrage against God. 
In this Word He applies it as the measure of 
God’s love to the sinner. We cannot do better 
then, than to take this, our Lord’s solitary confes- 
sion of physical suffering, as revealing to us His 
purpose in the mystery of pain. 

The world has always been baffled by the prob- 
lem of pain. In different ways it has tried to 
meet it, but never, until our Lord came with the 
key of His Cross, was there any to unlock this 
secret, and solve the mystery of suffering. 

Some had opposed to pain a proud, unyielding 
spirit. They had sought by means of a stern phil- 
esophy to show themselves superior to what they 
regarded as the necessity of a blind, remorseless 
fate. Such could see no purpose in the trials and 
sorrows of life, but viewing them only as inevitable 
evils, they sought to steel themselves against 


64 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


them, relying in this solely upon the pride of their 
unaided will. If they must needs suffer they 
would demean themselves as who should say be- 
fore his tormentors, “Afflict me if you will, but 
know that you shall never wring from me a recog- 
nition of your power.” Bravely some have per- 
severed in acting out this difficult part which, 
when most successfully achieved, leaves the spirit 
only the harder and less God-like for the struggle. 
But the human heart cannot for long sustain this 
role. It must be honest with itself. Sooner or 
later, and in its own way, it must give expression 
to its suffering, and seek for sympathy. It can 
indeed suffer, and suffer in patience. But it can- 
not suffer alone. Our Lord gave expression to the 
great need of the heart when in the Psalm, in the 
dread apprehension of His Passion, He cries: “O 
go not from Me, for trouble is nigh at hand, and 
there is none to help Me” (Psalm xxii. 11). He 
does the same here, when he utters the ery, “I 
thirst,” and invites our sympathy in what He is 
yet so willing to bear. 

But another method of dealing with the prob- 
lem of pain is the very opposite of that just con- 


FIFTH WORD. 65 


sidered. Since sorrow is ever dogging the foot- 
steps of the children of men, some have made it 
the one great end of existence to elude its touch, 
and by every means possible to cheat it of its pur- 
pose. This is that materialism which makes 
pleasure the end of life, and consults the senses 
rather than the reason or conscience as its guide to 
happiness. It makes the demands of the body 
paramount, while it smothers the nobler aspira- 
tions of the soul. And this was the philosophy 
dominant in the world, when with parched lips 
our Lord utters from His Cross the ery “TI thirst.” 
We may depend upon it, nothing short of the Pas- 
sion of the Son of God, with its consecration of 
physical pain, could have wrought the miracle 
by which, in the space of a few years, millions 
were to be rescued from shameful degradation of 
the body, to the self-mastery, and purity and holi- 
ness of the religion of Christ. 

And once more this cry of physical pain was 
perhaps necessary to refute an error which while _ 
old enough to have disturbed the Church in the 
early days of her history, has in our own day been 
revived and taught with the saddest havoe of souls. 


66 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


There were those in an early age who taught that 
Christ did not truly suffer; that it was not a body 
of veritable flesh and blood which hung upon the 
Cross, but a phantasm which, though it appeared 
to suffer, in reality knew no pain. In like manner 
there are those to-day who, while professing the 
Name of Him who said on the Cross, “I thirst,” 
tell us that there is no such thing as pain. We 
need not pause at such a time as this to do more 
than note the contradiction. On Good Friday, 
at least, few will contend for a Christianity whose 
cross is a fable. 

No, as our Lord had a true Human Soul, so 
He had also a real Human Body; and as His 
pure Soul felt the weight of our sin, so His Sa- 
cred Body truly suffered, and truly died for our 
sin. And because He once suffered Who now 
lives forevermore triumphant over death, pain is 
not for us Christians the evil the world has so long 
regarded it. Even were it possible for us by one 
prayer to have all pain and sorrow taken out of 
the world, it would be an act of folly to utter that 
prayer. Sin being what it is, the one great evil, 
and the world what it is, as it lies dead in sin, pain 


FIFTH WORD. 67 


is the indispensable antidote of a moral corrup- 
tion which but for this restraint would have passed 
all bounds. Pain is necessary to sober us in our 
pleasures, to teach us detachment, to recall us 
when forgetful to the true meaning of life. Pain 
is left in the world as its stern but merciful 
purifier, and any sufferer whom it summons to 
bear his part in that which is so necessary, may, 
if he will, suffer along with Christ, and fulfil a 
mission at least as glorious as any which makes 
demand upon active and energetic toil. Whether 
or not we have ourselves had our part in this 
vocation of suffering, we are all the time partak- 
ing of benefits ministered at the hands of suffer- 
ers whose hearts are sorrowing, or whose bodies 
are in pain. And how many of such blessed min- 
istrants to our life there are! When some stub- 
born spirit of pride takes possession of the heart, 
or some baneful stress of passion lays hold upon 
the senses, how sweet, how wholesome is the re- 
buke that comes from some bed of sickness, it 
may be from some little child who folds his tiny 
hands patiently, as he lies in pain upon his cot, 
and from his little white pulpit preaches to us 


68 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


silently, but so eloquently, of the humility and 
purity of the Cross of Christ. How often has it 
been the example of some sufferer that has taught 
us that there is something better and higher in 
this life than the following of our own way, the 
seeking of our own pleasure! 

But then, besides, the suffering in the world 
is love’s great opportunity, the invitation to un- 
selfishness, the call for heroic self-surrender. Sad 
indeed would this world be if the dreary spectacle 
of its selfishness and lust and greed were not often 
relieved by the moral beauty of self-sacrifice. 
Yet it is the presence of pain that makes these 
virtues possible. And how manifold and how 
beautiful are the ministries which it is ever calling 
into exercise! How little in comparison should we 
know of the love of our very dearest but for the 
unselfish manifestations of sympathy which 
trouble or pain have called forth, and caused them 
to lavish upon us. How imperfect would be even 
the knowledge of a mother’s love, did the child’s 
tears never need her sympathy! Out of the suf- 
ferings of humanity have sprung up the many 
noble charities established for their relief, which 


FIFTH WORD. 69 


are enduring monuments of the sympathy and 
love which the Cross has brought into the world! 
To these sufferings we owe the gentle patience of 
Sisters of Mercy, the tender care which follows 
armies in battle, the heroic devotion to duty of 
many a faithful priest, and of many a good physi- 
cian, and indeed every self-sacrificing act which 
enriches and ennobles life. How purifying, how 
uplifting, and how necessary to the welfare of our 
spiritual life are these examples of self-sacrifice ! 
Ever and again when the world seems settling 
down into its groove of selfish monotony, there 
arises even though it be out of some cruel disaster, 
the deed of heroic self-sacrifice, in which someone 
unknown by name, who thought he was but doing 
his duty, has laid down his life for others, and 
pointed us all again to the beauty of the Cross. 
For after all there is nothing which so appeals to 
the heart, or holds it under so mighty a spell, as 
the beauty of self-sacrifice. 

Let us turn then again to the Temple of our 
Lord’s Body as the law of suffering is fulfilled 
in It. That suffering had been typified by the 
blood shedding of the countless victims of the 


70 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


earthly temple. But it was not possible that the 
blood of bulls and of goats should take away sin. 
“Wherefore when He cometh into the world He 
saith, Sacrifice and offerings thou wouldest not, 
but a Body hast Thou prepared for Me” (Heb. 
x. 4, 5).In that Body which is both the Temple of 
His Ministry, and the material of His Sacrifice, 
we behold Him as He utters this complaint of 
physical pain. Since we could not enter with 
Him into the secret sorrow of His Soul, let us look 
upon this. Lo! here He speaks plainly, and 
speaks no proverb. In His sacred Body, racked 
upon the Cross and tormented with thirst, He 
speaks a language which all can understand. In 
nothing could He so commend His love to us, as 
by what He suffered for our sakes. 

Pain was no new thing in the world when He 
came into the world to redeem it. Men fled from 
pain or vainly mocked it, but until He came and 
laid His Hands upon it, none knew how to use 
it, nor understood why it should be so plentiful 
on the earth. Far from spurning it, He made 
choice of it as of inestimable worth in the purpose 
for which He had come. That purpose was to 


FIFTH WORD. 71 


declare His Father’s love to a fallen world, and 
to redeem it from its sin. But how shall He make 
men believe that love? By His miracles? “TI 
have wrought many wonderful works among you, 
for which of those works do ye stone Me?” By 
His words? “If I say the truth, why do ye not 
believe Me?’ Ah! there is still one language 
of love when every other fails, and that is the lan- 
guage which is uttered from the Cross, whether 
in spoken word, or still more wonderful silence— 
_the language of suffering. We might still have 
had the treasures of our Lord’s teaching, we might 
still have had the example of His most holy life, 
but never could we have learned His love for us 
except as He translated it into the language of 
pain. “Greater love hath no man than this, that 
a man lay down his life for his friends” (St. John 
xv. 13). “TI, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
draw all men unto Me” (St. John xii. 32). It is 
the measure of the Cross which demonstrates to 
us the height and depth, the length and breadth 
of the love of Christ. 

Let us then learn the wisdom of the Cross. 
Let us not foolishly mock at pain, let us not in 


72 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


terror and dismay flee from it; but when, by the 
will of God it comes to us, let us go forth to meet 
it. Let us dare to embrace it, and make it our 
friend, for it will be to us a friend in very deed. 
With it as our companion, let us lift up our eyes to 
Him who hung upon the Cross, and by uniting our 
will to His let us sanctify our suffering. By such 
a proof of our love shall we give drink to Him, 
who in draining the cup of sorrow for us, said “I 
thirst.” 


SIXTH WORD. 


“Tt is finished” (St. John xix. 30). 
THE BODY MYSTICAL. 


Tue two words that remain for our consid- 
eration are recorded, the one by St. John, and the 
other by St. Luke, as having been spoken in the 
very moment when, bowing His sacred Head, our 
Lord gave up the Ghost. They must have been 
uttered in the same breath. Notwithstanding the 
fact that they were spoken in this moment of our 
Saviour’s deepest humiliation, they are words of 
triumph and of joy. 

Our Lord ever associated joy with the Cross. 
He went forward to embrace His Cross with the 
confidence and courage of a Conqueror. When 
He foretells His coming Passion, and holding up 
the Cross before the startled vision of his disciples 


74 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


announces in detail the cireumstances of the Cruci- 
fixion, He does not fail to couple with this an- 
nouncement, the promise of the glory which should 
follow: “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all 
things that are written by the Prophets concern- 
ing the Son of. Man shall be accomplished. For 
He shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall 
be mocked, and spitefully entreated and spitted 
on: and they shall scourge Him, and put Him to 
death: and the third day He shall rise again” (St. 
Luke xviii. 31-34). “All things that are written 
concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished.” 
It is the same word as that used here when He 
says “It is finished.” And because all is now ac- 
complished, He rejoices as in a work done, a 
victory achieved. He had spoken before of a 
Baptism that He should be baptized with, and had 
looked forward day by day with patient yearn- 
ing for its fulfilment. “How am [I straitened, 
until it be accomplished!” (St. Luke xii. 50). 
All through His suffering the glorious issue of 
His Passion was before Him, and the anticipation 
of the victory in which it should end sustained 
Him. Even before He left the upper room where 


SIXTH WORD. 75 


He had kept the Passover with His disciples, and 
while Gethsemane and the Praetorium and Cal- 
vary were still awaiting Him, He had spoken of 
His victory as if it were already an accomplished 
fact. They are His last words of instruction to 
His disciples before going forth to die: “In the 
world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good 
cheer, I have overcome the world” (St. John xvi. 
33). We shall not rightly learn the lesson of the 
Cross unless we learn also the confidence of its 
certain triumph, and hasten to accept it with Him 
“Who for the joy set before Him endured the 
Cross, despising the shame.” 

It is not then simply as having reached the 
end of His suffering, and as having drained to the 
dregs the cup of His Passion, that our Lord cries, 
“Tt is finished.” The meaning of this cry is not 
exhausted when we refer it to the fulfilment of all 
that Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms spake 
concerning Him, or that was predicted by the 
ceremonial types and shadows of the older law. 
Even the blessed truth that in filling up His suffer- 
ings He had paid the full price of our Redemp- 
tion, making perfect and complete His satisfaction 


76 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


for the sins of the world, leaves the true import 
of the cry “It is finished” still unexplained. As 
we have seen, the word used here is elsewhere 
translated by “accomplish” or “fulfil.” Perhaps 
the Latin version, “Consuwmmatum est,” is a still 
better equivalent. For it is precisely the con- 
summation of the Divine purpose which is now 
realized in the moment of death, as distinct from 
the filling up of the measure, whether of suffer- 
ing or of work which that purpose involved, that 
constitutes the deep underlying joy of this Word. 

Here the Twenty-second Psalm comes again 
to our aid, that Psalm to which we have recurred 
so often in these meditations, and which has been 
well called the Programme of the Crucifixion. 
Not only does this Psalm, so sad in its beginning, 
culminate in a strain of joy, but its last ten verses 
may be said to afford a commentary upon the 
Word we are considering. 

And what is to be especially noted is, that He 
who speaks throughout the Psalm, and who in its 
beginning cries out in the mysterious loneliness 
of His sorrows, is now no longer Alone. The 
Solitary Sufferer of the earlier verses is now en- 


SIXTH WORD. 77 


compassed by His brethren; standing up in the 
midst of the redeemed, He is the Leader in the 
praise of the great congregation. All the ends 
of the world, all kindreds and nations worship 
with Him. He is the Head of a great Family, 
the Father of a mighty posterity. ‘My seed shall 
serve Him, they shall be counted unto the Lord for 
a generation. They shall come and the Heaven 
shall declare His righteousness, unto a people that 
shall be born, whom the Lord hath made” (Psalm 
xxii. 31, 32). 

“Consummatum est.” The joy of our Lord in 
this ery is the accomplishment at last, and at so 
great a cost, of that which makes it possible to 
incorporate men into a mystical union with His 
own Flesh. The sanctified Manhood in which 
He dies in expiation for sin, is, because of this 
expiation, to diffuse itself as a life-giving seed 
through the mass of humanity. “Except a corn 
of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” 
(St. John xii. 24). It is the exulting of our 
Lord’s natural Body in the increase that shall be 
His in His Mystical Body. It is the Temple 


78 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


which enshrined the Godhead, rejoicing in its ex- 
pansion to embrace all of mankind who come to 
Him for sanctuary. As He cries, “It is finished” 
our Lord is thinking of the millions upon millions 
of the Baptized who shall be united to Him by the 
new Birth, and made bone of His bone, and flesh 
of His Flesh. ‘When Thou shalt make His Soul 
an Offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He 
shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the 
Lord shall prosper in His Hand” (Isaiah liii. 10). 

The truth which lies at the foundation of this 
joy, is the converse of that considered under the 
Fourth Word. There we saw Christ identifying 
Himself with us, making Himself the Penitent 
for the sins of the world. Here the meaning is, 
that through the work consummated on the Cross, 
we are identified with Him. It is simply a matter 
of fact that the New Testament makes all our 
participation in the Merits of Christ to depend 
upon union with Him through His Mystical Body. 
So truly are we by Baptism identified with His 
Body, that St. Paul says of the baptized, “Ye are 
the Temple of the living God” (II. Cor. xvi. 6). 
Our inability to explain the mystery must not 


SIXTH WORD. 79 


deter us from confessing the truth that the Church 
and the Body of Christ are identical, “Jesus 
Christ being the chief Corner Stone in whom all 
the building fitly framed together groweth unto an 
holy Temple in the Lord, in whom ye also are 
builded together for an habitation of God through 
the Spirit” (Ephesians ii. 20-22). As members 
thus of the Body of Christ we died with Him, 
we were buried with Him, we rose in Him, in 
heavenly places even now we sit with Him. O that 
on this day at least, in which the great work was 
consummated, many might be brought to lay 
hold upon a truth, which, though it is presented 
in the New Testament so constantly, and with such 
a wealth and variety of illustration that it seems 
to burn in the fervor and insistence of its enun- 
ciation, is by thousands overlooked with an open 
Bible in their hands! 

It is Christ Himself who speaks of His Body 
under the figure of the Temple. His Jewish 
hearers, though they did not perceive His hidden 
reference, would have the clearest notion as to 
the meaning of the term itself. For what to them 
was the Temple? It was the place where the 


80 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Almighty had recorded His Name, the dwelling 
which He was pleased to make His habitation, 
the House in which His people should be gathered 
together, where His Presence and His Power were 
manifested, and where alone acceptable sacrifice 
and worship could be offered. 

What the Temple foreshadowed under the fig- 
urative and preparatory system of the older law, 
was to be realized in the fulness and perfection 
of the substance in the Body of Christ. 

This Temple He entered when He took our 
flesh of the substance of the Virgin Mary His 
Mother, and in it for evermore it pleases Him to 
dwell. In this Temple the Almighty recorded His 
Name, when the Name of Jesus was received, a 
pledge of the work now finished in which He saves 
us from our sins. But it is more especially of our 
part in this Temple, as it is the House of God 
for all nations that our Lord speaks in this ery 
“Tt is finished.” It is by the work here accom- 
plished that His Mystical Body shall gather into 
itself of all people. In this Temple of His Body, 
His Holy Catholic Church, His all-atoning Sac- 
rifice is to live on, and He Himself in that same 


SIXTH WORD. 81 


Body which hung upon the Cross is to be ever pres- 
ent, our one means of access to the Father, and of 
true and acceptable worship, as by His Eucharistic 
Presence He shall make good the word of the 
Psalm, “In the midst of the congregation will I 
praise Thee” (Psalm xxii. 22). And yet once 
more, and above all, in this Temple He Himself 
is to be made our Food, that so by eating His Flesh 
and drinking His Blood we may more and more be 
made partakers of His sacred and life-giving 
Humanity. 

Well may we see in this Word the fulfilment 
of a prophecy spoken a thousand years before: 
“Wisdom hath builded her House, she hath hewn 
out her seven pillars, she hath killed her beasts, 
she hath mingled her wine, she hath furnished her 
table” (Proverbs ix. 1, 2). 

“Consummatum est.” “A certain man made 
a great supper and bade many, and sent His ser- 
vant at supper time to say to them that were 
bidden, Come; for all things are now ready” (St. 
Luke xiv. 16, 17). Surely none can meditate as 
we do to-day upon the Sacrifice of the Death of 
Christ, and not long to lay hold upon His work of 


82 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


Atonement, and that by some means so definite 
and tangible that there can be no doubt of his 
identification with the sacrifice, and intimate per- 
sonal union with his Lord. Who that knows the 
meaning of the work now accomplished but must 
long to receive worthily the Sacrament of His 
love. ‘“O sacred Banquet, in which Christ is re- 
ceived, the memory of His Passion renewed, the 
mind filled with grace, and the pledge of future 
glory given unto us!”” Here we have been engaged 
in thinking about the Passion. As well as we 
could we have brought the scene before us 
and have meditated upon its blessed fruits. 
But in the Holy Eucharist we are in the actual 
Presence of Him who through so great suffering 
consummated His work. And the crowning bless- 
ing won for us by His Passion is this, that He has 
made possible for us a personal union with Him- 
self- so real, so intimate, that not His Blessed 
Mother or St. John, as they stood by His Cross, 
came so near Him as we can come when by com- 
munion we receive Him into ourselves. O then, 
as we have dwelt already upon the measure of His 
love for us, let us see in this triumphant Word 


SIXTH WORD. 83 


which announces the completion of His work, 
His longing to draw all men unto Himself. Long 
has He hung with wide extended arms that He 
may embrace all who come to Him. His work is 
now done. “All is now ready.” 

O may we accomplish our part by codperating 
with Him in what He has so graciously and so 
lovingly prepared for us, and may we so gratify 
the yearning of His sacred Heart, that He may 
see of the travail of His Soul and be satisfied 
with it. 


SEVENTH WORD. 


“Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit.” 
(St. Luke xxiii. 46.) 


THE SANCTUARY OF THE SPIRIT. 


Wuen our Lord, in figurative language said, 
“Destroy this Temple and in three days I will 
raise it up,” He was not instituting a merely cas- 
ual and fanciful analogy. It had been a part of 
His purpose of old in the minute instructions con- 
cerning every detail of the Tabernacle, that it 
should, in a symbolical way, represent His Hu- 
manity. The analogy had existed in fact from the 
time that the Tabernacle was set up in the wilder- 
ness. “See that thou make all things according 
to the pattern shewed thee in the Mount,” was the 
command given to Moses. In the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, reference is made to this in a passage in 


SEVENTH WORD. 85 


which our Lord is expressly called “A Minister of 
the Sanctuary and of the true Tabernacle which 
the Lord pitched and not man” (viii. 1-5). The 
analogy was perpetuated in the Temple as the 
permanent form of the Tabernacle, and it shall 
live on forever in the Heavenly J erusalem, con- 
cerning which St. John says: “I saw no temple 
therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb 
are the Temple of it” (Rev. xxi. 22). It was 
therefore a part of the typical and educative pur- 
pose which the Temple was to serve that it should 
in the manner of its construction as well as in the 
nature of its appointments figuratively represent 
the Body of Christ. Its threefold divisions of 
an outer court, the Holy place, and the Holy of 
Holies, in which last enclosure was the Ark of 
the Covenant where the cloud of glory over- 
shadowed the Mercy Seat, may have been designed 
to set before us the complex nature of our Human- 
ity in which we pass from the body which links 
man to the animal creation, to the innermost 
shrine of his immortal spirit which allies him to 
the angels. 

While no exact theory as to the constitution of 


86 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


the inner nature of man can be based upon the use 
made in Scripture of the words soul and spirit, 
which are often employed interchangeably, there 
is nevertheless to be recognized in Scripture a 
certain discrimination in its preference of the 
word spirit to indicate the deepest part of our 
humanity, the point of contact between man and 
God. The functions of the mind by which it lays 
hold upon the things of God, and those which it 
exercises in its relation with the things of sense 
are governed by laws so distinct, and are exercised 
in such separate spheres of our being, that they are 
well symbolized by the two inner enclosures of the 
Temple, under one roof, yet parted by a veil. St. 
Paul recognizes the case in which these spiritual 
faculties are keenly active under the operation of 
the Holy Ghost, while at the same time the soul 
is deprived of the distinct self-consciousness which 
is in the province of the understanding (I. Cor. 
xiv. 14). 

And who does not know in the innermost ex- 


periences of his own life the existence of spiritual — 


depths which the soul itself cannot fathom? And 
which the intellect, while recognizing their pres- 


SEVENTH WORD. 87 


ence, is powerless to explain? Take the example 
of Conscience. How wonderfully, by laws of its 
own it works in the depths of our being! What 
is this voice, so quiet, and yet so insistent, so 
authoritative in its utterance that we must needs 
obey it even though we do not understand the 
reason of its commands? 

Or again, have we not all discovered, after 
certain experiences in our lives, deeps of spiritual 


joy of which at the time we were only partially 
conscious? The mind was at the time anxious 


and perturbed, the soul and its faculties occupied 
and troubled with the things that press upon the 
outward life. It was only afterwards that we 
were made aware how beneath all that ruffled the 
surface of our being we had been truly and se- 
renely happy in the interior peace of a deep spirit- 
ual calm. 

Now this may perhaps help us, not indeed to 
explain, but more intelligently to accept the Mys- 
tery implied in a previous Word. When our Lord 
uttered the cry, “My God, My God, why hast 
Thou forsaken Me?” He was still tarrying, if we 
may so speak, outside that second veil of the Tem- 


88 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


ple of His Humanity, which shut off from Him 
the conscious joy of the Beatific Vision, the glory 
of which nevertheless filled the inner Sanctuary 
of His Man’s Nature. Within the solitude of His 
Soul, He was, for the tasting of His Passion, 
alike excluded from the sympathy of man, and 
deprived of the consolation of the Godhead from 
which in fact His Manhood could not for a mo- 
ment be separated. 

There is, however, this great difference, ever 
to be borne in mind, between our inner experiences 
and those of our Lord. We are to a great meas- 
ure acted upon without our consent, and are not 
only passive, but often helpless under these expe- 
riences. But Christ “as a Son over His own 
House” (Heb. iii. 6) directs and rules all things 
in the Temple of His Humanity. Every affection 
of His Heart, as well as every thought of His 
Mind, was perfectly under His control. Even in 
His Passion He was perfectly free, and the Master 
of all His sufferings whether of Soul or Body. 
“THe was offered because He willed it.” He freely 
surrendered His life. “No man taketh it from 
Me. I lay it down of Myself” (St. John x. 18). 


SEVENTH WORD. 89 


He who through the whole of His earthly life had, 
in order to His experience of suffering and humil- 
iation, exercised a miracle of restraint, made 
necessary by the Personal union of His Manhood 
with the Godhead, could still say in the climax of 
His sufferings, “My Soul is alway in My Hand” 
(Psalm exix. 109). He who regulates every de- 
tail of His Passion, overruling the purposes of 
men, and who Himself directs all the sad ritual 
of the Cross, is Master also of every experience 
of His Human Soul. 

Now, therefore, when all has been accom- 
plished, He deliberately and with a loud voice, 
speaks the Word at the utterance of which the veil 
in yonder temple is rent from top to the bottom. 
May we not think of Him, as also in this same mo- 
ment, and by a similar act of His will, rending the 
veil which for the time had shut off from Him the 
contemplation of that deep interior peace and joy 
which were His by right, and while through the 


parted veil the Beatific Vision, the true Shech- 
inah of the glory of God streams forth and floods 


with conscious joy every faculty of His Soul, en- 
tering as it were the Holy of Holies of His Spirit, 


90 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


that from this deepest Sanctuary of the Temple of 
His Humanity He may make the final Oblation of 
that Humanity to God ? 

As afterwards, when He was to carry our na- 
ture up to heaven, He chose the Mount of Olivet, 
that from an elevation of this earth He might 
ascend up to God; so now, He retires as it were 
to the mountain-top of that nature which He had 
assumed, to that loftiest region from which it looks 
off upon God, and which in the case of His sinless 
Manhood was ever bathed in the sunlight of His 
Divinity, and there He says: “Father, into Thy 
Hands I commend My Spirit ?” 

And O, the sweetness of that surrender as our 
Lord turns from His accomplished work to meet 
the embrace of that Eternal Father, the fulfilling 
of whose will had been the single motive of His 
life! This is preéminently the moment for us to 
pause and again call to mind the tenderness of that 
Bond of Love which unites the Father and the 
Son. How constant had been our Lord’s appeal 
to it throughout His Ministry! To recur only to 
the words spoken on the eve of His Passion, how 
full are they of His dependence upon the Father’s 


SEVENTH WORD. 91 


Will as the one great sustaining motive of the Pas- 
sion! To this He refers every word and every 
work of His earthly life: “The words that I speak 
unto you, I speak not of Myself: but the Father 
that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works” (St. 
John xiv. 10). “That the world may know that I 
love the Father, and as the Father gave Me com- 
mandment even so I do” (Ibid. ver. 31). “I have 
not spoken of Myself, but the Father which sent 
Me, He gave Me a commandment what I should 
say and what I should speak” (Ibid. xii. 49). 
While enduring the contradiction of sinners 
against Himself it is their malice toward the 
Father which grieves Him: “He that hateth Me, 
hateth My Father also” (Ibid. xv. 23). Though 
all should forsake Him in His Passion, this love 
shall sustain Him: “Ye shall be scattered every 
man to His own, and shall leave Me Alone; and 
yet I am not Alone because the Father is with Me” 
(Ibid. xvi. 32). The honor to be procured for 
His Father’s Name is His compensation for 
all His suffering: “Now is My soul troubled, 
and what shall I say? Father, save Me from 
this hour; but for this cause came I unto this 


92 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


hour. Father, glorify Thy Name” (Ibid. xii. 
27, 28). Even in that sad moment when Judas 
had gone out after the sop: “Now is the Son of 
Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him” (Jbid. 
xiii. 31). The Father’s love is the one, and all- 
satisfying treasure in which He delights, and 
which He holds out as the reward to those who 
follow Him: “If ye keep My commandments ye 
shall abide in My love, even as I keep My Father’s 
commandments and abide in His love” (Ibid. 
xv. 10). “If a man love Me, he will keep My 
words, and My Father will love him, and we will 
come unto him, and make our abode with him” 
(Ibid. xiv. 23). 

The whole of the seventeenth chapter of St. 
John’s Gospel is but a paraphrase of the words, 
“Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit.” 
Listen to Him as He prays in the upper room with 
His disciples: “Father, the hour is come; glorify 
Thy Son that He also may glorify Thee.” “I 
have glorified Thee on the earth: I have finished 
the work which Thou gavest Me to do. And now, 
O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own Self 
with the glory which I had with Thee before the 


SEVENTH WORD. 93 


world was” (ver. 1, 4, 5). Everywhere the 
words of our Lord are full of His delight in His 
Father’s love, of His obedience to His command, 
of His zeal for His glory, His hunger and thirst 
for the accomplishment of His will. 

And how sweet are those manifestations of the 
Father’s love for His Only Begotten Son! That 
love reveals itself as it breaks forth like a 
stream of sunlight through the riven rain clouds. 
It answers the cry, “Father, glorify Thy Name” 
with the response, “I have both glorified it, 
and will glorify it again” (St. John xii. 28). 
As Jesus went up out of the water after His 
Baptism, and again at the Transfiguration of 
our Lord in the Mount, the Father’s voice was 
heard: “This is My Beloved Son in whom I am 
well pleased” (St. Matt. iii. 17). “This is My 
Beloved Son, hear Him” (St. Luke ix. 35). 

What wonder, then, that the heart and mind 
fail as we try to meditate upon the joy of this mo- 
ment in which the Only Begotten of the Father’s 
Love returns with His accomplished work, and 
with His parting breath gives up His Spirit to 
His Father’s embrace. The veil of the Temple is 


94 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


rent. The joy of the Father’s Presence from 
which for our sakes He had for a time hidden His 
Face is henceforth His forever. And this it is 
His will to share with us. For us, too, the veil 
is rent. “When Thou hadst overcome the sharp- 
ness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of 
Heaven to all believers.” Henceforth the light of 
the glory of God fills the whole Temple of the 
Catholic Church. “This is none other but the 
House of God, and this is the gate of heaven” 
(Gen. xxviii. 17). Here at earthly Altars He 
still exercises His eternal Priesthood, and still 
pleads His all-sufficient Sacrifice through minis- 
ters whom He has appointed to act in His Name. 
Here He gives as our spiritual Food that same 
Humanity in which He suffered, and in which He 
is alive forevermore. Here, through the ministry 
of His Priests, He is present in the absolving 
word as often as any sinner turns to Him in peni- 
tent confession of sin. Here He takes us up into 
union with Himself, and with His angels and 
saints who in Him enjoy the vision of God. Here 
it is that our souls are strengthened for the fellow- 
ship of His sufferings, and our bodies as they bear 


SEVENTH WORD. 95 


their burden of pain are hallowed by His Cross. 
Here our spirits may drink in the fulness of all 
that He has to give, and are satisfied with the liv- 
ing water of His Salvation. Here, even the more 
it may be when our souls are least conscious of 
their blessing, He is near us, as He was with the 
disciples on the way to Emmaus, whose eyes were 
holden that they should not know Him, and whose 
hearts nevertheless burned within them as He 
opened to them the Scripture. 

And then if we ask for what end in the Temple 
of His Body all these helps and consolations are 
ours, surely it is that we may follow the example 
of His most holy Life. For we, too, as individual 
members of Christ are temples of the Living God. 
“Know ye not that your body is the temple of 
the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of 
God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought 
with a price, therefore glorify God in your body, 
and in your spirit which are God’s” (I. Cor. vi. 
19, 20). 

Let us then in this most solemn, most blessed 
hour, renew that dedication by which we were in 
our Baptism set apart as temples of the living 


96 THE TEMPLE OF HIS BODY. 


God. Let us purge those temples from sin, by a 
worthy repentance, if in aught they have been de- 
filed, and here beneath the shadow of His Cross 
consecrate them again to His service. Ours it 
may be, while He continues us in life to render to 
Him as our grateful homage the labor of our 
hands, the confession of our lips, the recollected- 
ness of a life in which His perfect Pattern is ever 
before the eyes. To Him we may consecrate every 
sorrow, in His fellowship bear every suffering, by 
the help of His grace finish the work He has given 
us to do. And at last, as He Himself has taught 
us, and relying solely on the merits of His most 
holy Passion, with our parting breath unite our- 
selves to His prayer, “Father, into Thy Hands 
I commend My Spirit.” 


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